The 100:10:1 method – the heart of my game design process

My pal Nick Bentley has an intriguing game design process he calls The 100:10:1 Method. Sounds like it would be a great way to exercise your designer’s brain and spark creativity, like you do with The Extraordinaires Design Studio, by The Creativity Hub (need to blog about this at some point, too).

My usual design method is to wait until something strikes my fancy and then obsessively prod at it for months until I have a game or I lose interest. Not the most productive method, I know.

This is the second post of a series on practical game-design techniques. Here’s the first.

In my years designing games, my methods have evolved from Games-Randomly-Emerging-from-the-Inchoate-Chaos-of-my-Brain-Area to something resembling an honest-to-goodness, write-downable process. I’ve decided to share this process here, for four reasons:

1. I’ve used it to create most of my favorites among my own designs, which suggests it might have value.

2. I haven’t seen anything exactly like it.

3. Writing about it will give me ideas for improving it.

4. Pondering game design is one of the two great pleasures of my life (the other is spending time with my ladylove, who’s just sort of discombobulatingly great to be around)

I call it the 100:10:1 method. I’ll start by describing it, then discuss why it helps me.

The 100:10:1 Method

It has three steps:

Step 1 – I quickly write 100 short game concepts in a notebook. In less…